There’s a jolt of dread the moment a question comes up that you do not know the answer to when you’re a business owner or team leader sitting around a table with a bunch of your peers.
The fear that used to run through my head every time: that they’re going to find out I’m underqualified.
Leaders often feel like they have to have all of the answers, all of the time. People expected solutions, direction, and confidence…and I used to believe that admitting I didn’t know something would make me look like an idiot.
I’ve found that what actually makes a good leader is the opposite. The moment I got comfortable saying “I don’t know, but let me look into it and figure it out,” my team grew faster, our results improved, and I grew more confident, because I was willing to keep learning instead of pretending I already had.
Here’s how that shift actually happened, what it took to build a team that could handle not knowing, and what it cost me when I tried to have all the answers.
The CEO Should Not Be The Smartest Person In The Room
At some point I stopped fearing saying “I don’t know.” I realized we all don’t know. Even the CEOs of giant companies don’t know.
I am not the smartest person in the room. My team is. What I’m actually good at is getting a group of people together to do the thing that needs to be done. Being in business for 20+ years, I am no longer the person doing the daily activities. I don’t know how to do half of what my team does anymore. So it stopped being about protecting my own answer and started being about the team and supporting them to be good at what they do.
I’ve gotten very comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but let me look into it and figure it out.” You have to learn every day, especially in an industry like mine, where things change every day.
I’m not the only one who’s found that the “know-it-all” version of leadership doesn’t actually work. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a culture where people defended their own expertise and being right mattered more than learning. He rebuilt it around being a “learn-it-all” instead of a “know-it-all.” Under that shift, Microsoft went from a company being written off as a fading giant to the most valuable public company in the world (Inc Magazine). This is the same principle on a bigger stage: the leader who admits they don’t have it all figured out is the one whose team (and whose results) actually keep growing.
That instinct lines up with what the leadership research actually shows. Harvard Business School researcher Amy Edmondson studied 51 work teams and found that psychological safety (the freedom to admit “I don’t know” without fear) is what drives learning behavior, and learning behavior is what drives performance. Separate research published in the Academy of Management Journal, following 607 people across 161 teams, found that leaders who model humility (admitting mistakes, showing they’re willing to learn) see that humility spread through the team, which in turn drives higher performance.
Saying “I don’t know” isn’t just something that felt better to me personally. It’s made the team both feel better and perform better.
How I Built a Team Culture Where People Feel Safe Saying “I Don’t Know”
I knew that this worked, so the next step was to turn it into a system.
We have hundreds of SOPs, and none of them are final, nor will they ever be. If something doesn’t work anymore, we get curious and explore.
- What didn’t work about it? Let’s sit down and discuss it.
- How would you see changing it? Let’s try it this way and see if it works.
- If it doesn’t work, what didn’t work about that? Then let’s try it another way.
Nothing’s concrete. Everything can be questioned, by anyone on the team, at any time. None of us are supposed to have it all figured out permanently in an ever-changing industry.
That’s not just how I run things. Ray Dalio built Bridgewater Associates around the same idea. He created an “issue log” where anyone (including junior staff) could flag a mistake by anyone, including Dalio himself. His principle was “pain plus reflection equals progress.” The mechanism is the same one behind our SOPs: it turns “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” into data the company needs, instead of a confession that costs you status.
This makes sense based on a meta-analysis in The Leadership Quarterly, drawing on more than 99 studies. They found that leaders who are transparent about their own limitations and lead from genuine values instead of performing confidence strongly correlates with follower trust, job satisfaction, and how effective a leader is rated by their own team.
What Happens When a Leader Stops Needing to Have Every Answer
I was out of the office for nine days recently. I had no panicked phone calls. No fear. I wasn’t checking in constantly, because I couldn’t. I was in this waiting mindset, unable to start something I wasn’t going to be able to finish. The team just handled it. They followed the SOPs and procedures we’ve built. My operations manager did the things I would’ve done to get things handled because he actually believes in the system we created.
I walked back in and felt calm. Whatever issues had come up, there was an SOP for it, and if there wasn’t, they figured it out. That’s proven success, again and again: I can step away, and everything keeps running smoothly.
That’s the actual payoff of building a team that’s allowed to say “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out” instead of one that’s waiting on me to hand them the answer.
That lines up with what the research on power and leadership shows too. UC Berkeley researcher Dacher Keltner has spent decades studying what he calls the “power paradox”: the traits that get people into leadership in the first place, things like empathy, openness, and giving credit to others, are the very traits people lose once they hold power and start acting like they need all the answers. Leaders who deliberately stay humble and keep learning are the ones who actually hold onto real influence. My team did not panic while I was gone because I did not have all the answers.
If you’re still trying to be the one everyone needs to hand the answer to, ask yourself: what would actually happen if you stepped away for nine days?
What Should Leaders Actually Do When You Don’t Know?
Say that you don’t know and become curious about how you can figure it out. That’s what makes a good leader.
I spent years thinking leadership meant walking into every room with a solution already in hand, and I built a team that grew faster, worked better, and could run without me the moment I stopped pretending that was true. Not-knowing can be an asset you build a culture on:
- SOPs that evolve as needed
- A team that trusts each other enough to say “let’s figure it out”
- A leader who’s more interested in getting it right than being right.
If this way of thinking about leadership resonates with you, stay connected at evolvingonward.com.